Run the Storm

by George Michelsen Foy

  On the 2nd Deck, seven scuttles—round hatches ringed by steel lips, or coamings, a couple of feet high and painted yellow—carry covers that are locked by four large movable bolts, cranked home into the coaming lips by wheel-driven gears. Gaskets along the covers’ inner edge deter waves, which in heavy seas will break through the thirty big ports (fifteen on each side) opening onto 2nd Deck, from sloshing down into the dry decks below. The integrity of the scuttles is important, for not only is 2nd Deck accessible to the elements, but it is much more open lengthwise than the other cargo decks. Only one bulkhead, or watertight steel wall, bisects this deck, between 2A- and 2-holds, whereas bulkheads break up the lower decks at each end of the five holds. Any water entering 2nd Deck will thus have relatively more space to run and do damage. Moreover, some of the scuttles lie in an angle between ventilation housings and the ship’s side, and water tends to collect there when the ship rolls. The scuttles are all supposed to be dogged before sailing; a quick three-quarter turn of the wheel on top is all it takes to secure them. But the wheels look the same open or closed; there is no way to check visually if the bolts have slotted home and, whereas standard procedure with the big gates is to log every time they are touched, the scuttles’ status is not recorded. Some of the bolts, too, are worn. And no one checks the gaskets; the consensus is that only a shipyard test, using high-pressure hoses, could assess their continuing integrity.

  Where daylight is not masked by overcast, it’s starting to pull long, ash-colored shadows from the Dames Point Bridge. El Faro, already stained by rust in places—in parts of the ship, some deckhands claim, rust has eaten right through the deck—turns more orange still under a beam of shine filtered horizontally through the pollution from downtown Jacksonville to the west.

  A flight of pelicans, like flying machines designed by a committee, cross the sky and splash down awkwardly in a creek separating Blount Island from the mainland. The two Moran tugs that will unstick El Faro from her dock lie moored on the mainland side of the creek, at Dames Point, deck lights burning, a slight thud of diesel emanating from their stacks.

  Around the point to the north—hidden among spavined trailer homes, swamp oaks ghouled with Spanish moss, and rotten pilings—lies a small marina, half-peopled with pleasure boats, a few of which are almost as old as El Faro. Just down the creek float a couple of shrimpers, nets splayed for repair. Between the docks and the marina office is Paulie’s dockside bar, open on three sides to the light, warm breeze wafting off the river. It’s a friendly place, sporting the usual maritime kitsch: a yellow life ring, a stretch of fishnet, a stuffed bonito. Signs read FISH NAKED: SHOW OFF YOUR BOBBERS; NO WORKING DURING DRINKING HOURS; $5 CHARGE FOR WHINING; JELL-O SHOT $3.

  One or two of El Faro’s crew have been known to slope into Paulie’s for a drink before departure since it has the advantage of being both hidden and a five-minute drive from the secure port area. No alcohol is allowed aboard the ship although, ironically, El Faro has carrried hundreds of thousands of gallons of rum as freight from Puerto Rico to the mainland. Sitting at the south end of the bar, a guy scoring his last cold one before going to sea can keep an eye on the cranes and tell, from their sustained pace or else a slowing in their rhythm, how close he is to sailing.

  5

  Joaquin.

  It starts as a shift in a goatherd’s robes.

  Experts in global weather might quibble; they’d claim it really started earlier, at a scale even more minute, such as one stroke of a seagull’s wings over Tasmania, a 2 percent hike in the frog population of a Saskatchewan pond: a function of the Lorenz effect, which posits a snowballing of weather consequences from the tiniest of initial causes. But the first recognizable symptom of the meteorological event that will become Hurricane Joaquin is a new, southerly breeze, very light at first but strengthening, that must disturb the cotton robe of some Omoro herder where he watches his flock in the high mountains of Ethiopia, near the east coast of Africa.

  The breeze is scout for a stronger, drier wind blowing north through the Turkana Channel between Kenya’s upcountry and Ethiopia’s highlands. Those mountains flick the breeze upward, where it bumps into a broader rush of warm, wet wind from the summer monsoon, flowing west out of the Indian Ocean. As the two winds touch, a tiny kink happens—a microcosmic roil, a twist of lower pressure in the vast flow of humid, low-pressure monsoon air.

  But the roil subsists, becoming its own miniature low-pressure system in the process. Since air always flows from higher pressure to lower, the kink starts to pull in air around it and rides the monsoon’s frontal system as an “African wave,” westward across the continent.

  Many such systems do not survive the journey. This one—albeit weakened occasionally by hot, dry blasts of air from the Sahara, and clogged by sand from the same desert;VIII its moisture content boosted at other times by wetter air bouncing off highlands in Congo and Cameroon; like a thirst-mad legionnaire dragging himself over sand dunes to water finally makes it to the Atlantic coast, somewhere around southern Morocco, near the Canary Islands.

  Here appears the first sign of Joaquin’s freakish nature, since it’s highly unusual for a potential hurricane to appear in the waters off Morocco. The low-pressure systems that later become hurricanes tend to reach the Atlantic much farther south, between eight and twenty degrees north of the equator, around the latitude of Senegal and the Cape Verde Islands. That latitude is normally free of the eastward-tending, high-altitude jet stream, which at lower levels induces wind shear. Wind shear—winds blowing from varied directions across a vertical column of atmosphere—will rip a low-pressure system apart, and such conditions are the norm where Joaquin shows up, farther north near the Canary Islands. This year, however, is an El Niño year, when the jet stream has been dragged southward by low pressure off South America, leaving the atmosphere off the Canary Islands relatively calm.

  Even at its inception, therefore, this pre-Joaquin is a freak system. Yet much of the basic mechanism of meteorology is visible in its formation, such as the destructive force of crosswinds on a low-pressure zone, the strengthening effect of heat and humidity on that zone. The change of state from warm humidity to vapor, the cooling of vapor back into rain, also mirror how El Faro’s steam engine works, and while it’s tempting to spot portent in such shared traits, they are only indicative of how basic to planetary physics are the movement from high to low pressure, the relationship of temperature to evaporation, the cyclic flows of a heat pump.

  But how this system transforms now—though it functions according to the same laws as continental weather systems—is so powerful, so dramatic, that it feels more like a science-fiction device; like what happens to a young superhero when he is exposed to the radioactive overdose that endows him with freakish powers, after which this normally meek, unathletic dweeb starts to toss locomotives around like Ping-Pong balls for the hell of it.

  The waters of the Atlantic off the Canary Islands in this postsummer season are extraordinarily warm, and they add both heat and humidity to wet, warm air at the low-pressure system’s core. Jazzed on the extra bolus of humid heat, the core starts to rise faster, drawing in more air, which rushes in as wind, further speeding up evaporation; this sucks in more air and stronger winds from all around in a self-sustaining, self-accelerating chain reaction.

  6

  Dinner on El Faro bears little resemblance to the sumptuous affairs on cruise ships with their creamy linen tablecloths, flower arrangements, haute cuisine, and servile third-world waiters. Two mess halls, one for officers, one for unlicensed personnel, take up the starboard and port sides, respectively, of the mess deck in the house. This is three levels up from the open Main Deck, upon which containers are stacked.IX

  The galley and pantries lie between the two eating areas; freezers and other food-storage spaces take up separate spaces on mess deck, which is arranged, like the three accommodation decks above, with a connecting passageway in the shape of a squared horseshoe, open side facing aft. The
passageway surrounds a steel casing containing the ship’s boiler-exhaust system, which extends vertically to the smokestack. Living spaces are lined up on the horseshoe’s outer edge, while utility areas—for laundry, linen, and other stores—lie inside, next to the casing.

  The galley is the usual food-service warren of stainless-steel ranges, fryolators, cabinets, and harsh neon, with lockers and refrigerators bolted against the bulkhead. Here, safe and protected in his domain, Lashawn Rivera is apt to talk football with Lonnie Jordan as Jordan, the assistant steward, baker, and breakfast chef, pulls a tray of Stouffer’s rolls from the oven.

  The crew’s mess is an equally functional area, little different from the average office canteen except that the tables are bolted down against the ship’s motion. As elsewhere on the ship the color scheme is largely industrial, gray-speckled decks, off-white walls. A few safety posters—one of them urges deckhands to lift with the legs, not with the back—and framed images of El Faro in Alaska and Kuwait, relieve the walls’ monotony. Serving arrangements are curiously formal. Deckhands and oilers pick their choices off a menu, and the cook and stewards load the plates and hand them out through an access hatch between galley area and mess. The two menus for each main meal usually include two of the three staples: beef, chicken, fish. Sometimes Rivera will tweak the dishes in the direction of soul or Latino food to please the unlicensed personnel.

  The officers’ mess looks no different except that, in deference to the officers’ loftier position in the chain of command, the tables are neatly set by the chief steward, Ted Quammie, who combines the positions of waiter, concierge, and stores manager; essentially, with Rivera’s help, he runs the ship’s housekeeping side.

  Quammie is sixty-seven but doesn’t look his age. He smiles often, one of those soft smiles that people sometimes rely on without knowing it to make daylight a bit brighter, in good part because the man behind the smile is nonjudgmental and reliably kind. Though he talks as easily as he grins, he rarely mentions his personal life. His accent, which comes from an English-speaking island in the Caribbean, no one seems to be quite sure which, kneads the vowels till they seem soft and full of colors and adds to the comforting effect.

  In one corner of the crew’s mess the Polish riding gang sit on their own. “Riding gang” is the mariner’s term for workers not part of the normal crew or watch schedules. These men work a full twelve-hour day shift and, when they get off, talk among themselves in what to the rest of the crew is a strange code of n’s, sh’s, and y’s. They are all welders and pipe fitters this trip; two electricians, their projects done, have just been sent home from Jacksonville. Only two of the men, Marcin Nita and Piotr Krause, speak any English, so none of the regular crew knows what they’re talking about except sometimes Jeff Mathias, the chief engineer assigned by Tote to supervise their work, who spends a lot of time asking Krause or Nita to translate.

  On departure it’s common for the captain to host a meal for available officers and the various Tote personnel responsible for arranging cargo and ship’s business ashore. On this evening at the butt end of September, Tim Neeson, Tote’s port engineer, is finishing up a discussion about payroll with the captain.

  Here, too, a landsman’s romantic view of the sea falls somewhat short of the truth. Instead of standing eagle-eyed at the helm, the master of a large commercial ship delegates most of the traditional captain’s duties to his or her mates,X and in such a system a good part of the skipper’s job consists of fielding reports from subordinates and dealing with paperwork: overtime, requests for equipment, company forms. Given that much of the office work must be printed out and physically logged, digitization has not lightened this workload much. Officers who trained to work with salt and steel, charts and weather, often resent the desk-job aspect of a captain’s brief.XI

  But a captain learns not to betray his thoughts, let alone resentments, and Davidson seems at ease and comfortable, lounging at the dinner table on the evening of September 29, cool in the air-conditioned house, while the chief steward stacks plates and the sunset paints peach tones on a bulkhead. In any event he’s unlikely to be worrying now about the balance between paperwork and deck duties. Davidson is an athletic man with close-cropped silver hair, an engaging grin, a friendly manner. Though of average height, he is known for his outsize appetite. Usually he orders both menus at dinner.

  Some masters, mates even, take refuge in their authority as officers and refrain from talking to deck or engine peons except when giving orders. Davidson harbors no such prejudices. This might in part be due to his down east background; like Danielle Randolph, like Third Engineer Michael Holland, like the new third engineer, Dylan Meklin, Davidson is a native of coastal Maine and a graduate of Maine Maritime Academy in Castine. The no-bullshit culture of the Maine coast includes a healthy contempt for authority, or at least for authority that is unearned.XII Davidson’s family had a summer home on Great Diamond Island and he grew up sailing. While in his teens he worked as a deckhand on Maine State ferries running across Casco Bay, an area known for its fogs and nor’easter storms. He earned his coastal captain’s license at an early age, and it could be that being promoted “through the hawsepipe” on ships too small to tolerate caste systems had something to do with his egalitarian style.

  Those who have shipped with “Captain Mike,” as he is often called, know him to be a skilled and professional mariner, someone who worked on tankers in Alaska, where rough seas are run-of-the-mill. On El Faro he has surely been keeping a close eye on the weather, which an expert captain will do almost instinctively, especially in Florida during hurricane season. Without a doubt he has repeatedly checked the principal sources of meteorological information on El Faro as they are emailed to his office workstation and relayed to a console on the bridge.

  7

  The forecast a Tote master consults, and which Michael Davidson is using to plan this voyage, consists of maritime predictions created by the federal National Weather Service, part of NOAA. The predictions for tropical cyclones are generated by a weather service subgroup, the National Hurricane Center, based in Miami. These forecasts are grouped under the headings Tropical Analysis and Forecast Branch high seas forecast (TAFB) and SAT-C. They are issued jointly as text messages around five and eleven eastern daylight time, both morning and afternoon (thus 0500, 1100, 1700, and 2300 in ship’s time), over the Inmarsat system, a satellite-based, privately run text/data-transmission service that has replaced long-distance shortwave radio sets on most commercial ships. The service includes not only communication and weather functions but two discrete distress-transmission modes as well.

  Inmarsat also provides satellite telephony and email transmissions, which are El Faro’s primary links to shore. The distress function includes GMDSS, for Global Marine Distress and Safety System, capable of transmitting a preformatted, ship-specific distress call with either automated or manually inputted position information in a text to the ship’s owner and the Coast Guard; and a more specialized, “covert” function called SSAS (Ship Security Alert System), which does the same thing only without any outward alarms or confirmation of transmission in case of takeover by pirates or other security-related emergencies.

  Earlier, when the scheduled NWS bulletin was due, Davidson probably left his stateroom and climbed one level up to the bridge, where he checked the Inmarsat console for the NWS bulletin, to compare Joaquin’s projected track to El Faro’s route off Florida’s eastern coast.

  The morning forecast today, September 29, puts Tropical Storm Joaquin at latitude 26.6 north, longitude 70.6 west, over five hundred miles east-southeast of Blount Island; the storm is said to be moving 270 degrees, or due west, and slowly, at four knots. Joaquin will remain a tropical storm, the NWS predicts. Its winds will top out at forty to fifty knots on October 1, weaken thereafter. Not much to worry about, though Davidson must bear in mind, as always with a tropical system, that no forecast is foolproof, that a storm can change direction quickly and with little warnin
g.

  Catastrophe starts with small details, such as the cross-flip of wind in the Ethiopian highlands that first triggered the low-pressure zone that would become Joaquin. Davidson and his mates do not spot such small seeds of trouble: they are invisible even to experts at the outset. But it is here, in the forecasts, that what will happen to El Faro starts to acquire more visible form; because on September 29 the packages, and the forecast, contain serious, and ominous, mistakes.

  At 11:00 a.m. on the day of departure, the predicted position for Joaquin is 180 miles too far northeast. Its wind speed is underestimated by sixty knots. Worst of all, perhaps, this forecast is dismissive of the storm and predicts it will not become a hurricane but will weaken instead and veer, eventually, northward.

  Davidson keeps an eye on the Weather Channel on a television in his stateroom—nearly everyone on the ship has a screen mounted on his cabin wall, or bulkhead—but the TV forecasting services, and most forecasters for that matter, are attuned to a land-based clientele, and from what you might glean from the six o’clock news on the twenty-ninth, you’d be forgiven for thinking no storm stewed out there at all.

  Before he went to dinner, Davidson would also have checked his office computer for the latest package sent by the bespoke marine-weather service Applied Weather Technology.XIII AWT’s Bon Voyage System, or BVS, sends emails on a schedule roughly concurrent with the National Weather Service’s SAT-C transmission. While AWT bases its predictions for waters around the United States entirely on the National Weather Service forecast, the company enhances those data with fancy, easy-to-read graphics, formatted for Microsoft Outlook, that show various weather events in vividly colored maps and graphs: very high winds are displayed in red, less strong in orange and yellow. The package also includes projections of the effect of wind, waves, and currents on an individual ship’s course, which the NWS does not.